Posts Tagged ‘Soviet Union’

Lobster has posted a very interesting review by their long-term contributor, Scott Newton, of Richard Sakwa’s book on the current geopolitical tensions over Ukraine, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: I.B. Tauris). Sakwa is the professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In this book, he tackles and refutes the story peddled to us by the mainstream media that the current confrontation between NATO and Russia and the civil war in Ukraine are due to Russian imperialism under Putin.

Sakwa is under no illusions how brutal and corrupt Putin’s regime is, but the book argues that in this instance, Russia is the victim. He argues that at the heart of the crisis is a conflict between two forms of Ukrainian nationalism. One wants a strong, united Ukraine centred firmly on Kiev, with Ukrainian as the sole official language, looking to the EU and the West, with its economy based on free trade and private industry. This form of Ukrainian nationalism is hostile to Russia, which is particularly resents because of the Holodomor, the horrific artificial famine created by Soviet collectivisation in the 1930s. The government is roughly liberal, but includes Fascists. The second form of Ukrainian nationalism is popular in the south and east, which are predominantly Russian-speaking, whose families and businesses have links with Russia, and which is dominated by heavy industry and reliant on trade with Russia. This wants a federal Ukraine, with both Ukrainian and Russian as the official languages.

The review discusses the origins of the Maidan Revolution, directed against the corrupt regime of Viktor Yanukovych, who had just signed a trade agreement with Russia. The nationalist regime which replaced him, led by Petro Poroshenko, was of the first, pro-western, anti-Russian type, was strongly influence by the Far Right, whose squads massacred anti-Maidan demonstrators. This regime set about demolishing Soviet-era monuments, establishing Ukrainian as the country’s only official language, and repudiating the agreement allowing Russia to station its ships in Sebastopol until 2042. As a result, Russia seized the Crimea, which had been Russian until 1954 and the Russian-speaking areas in the south and east seceded and split into different autonomous republics. Kiev responded by sending in troops, but this has led to a stalemate so far. The West supports Kiev, seeing Putin’s support of the Ukrainian separatists as the Russian president’s attempt to undermine the political order which emerged after the collapse of Communist in 1991.

Sakwa instead views Putin as reacting purely to preserve Russia from possible NATO aggression. This is the based on the original agreement with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe. Gorby also hoped to create a new international system in which the world would not be dominated by a single superpower, but there would be a number of different leading states, whose cultures and economic and political systems would differ. These difference would be respected, and they would all work together for international peace. This has been violated by the West, which has expanded eastward into Ukraine, which has also signed the Lisbon agreement with the EU. Putin’s response, which you don’t hear about, is to call for a federal, pluralist, non-aligned Ukraine, which cooperates with both Brussels and Moscow, and whose security is guaranteed by both sides.

There is also an economic dimension to this. The West wishes to promote laissez-faire capitalism. But this didn’t work when it was introduced into Russia by Yeltsin. This type of capitalism has been rejected, and 51 per cent of the Russian economy is owned by the state. Sakwa also notes that Putin has been active building up an alternative political and economic system across the globe, in eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Syria, and Cuba and Venezuela, as well as a system of alliances with the BRICS economies, as well as a Eurasian Economic Union with the former Soviet republics of central Asia. It is also cooperating with the China on the new silk road. The result has been that Russia has created a ‘second world alliance’ system with its own financial institutions and systems of international government.

Newton says of the book that

Sakwa’s argument that the Ukrainian crisis results from the destabilization of the country by forces committed to militantly anti-Russian nationalism, egged on by former Soviet bloc countries and external interference by the United States and the European Union, propelled by a dogmatic and triumphalist liberal universalism, is highly persuasive.

This is how it appears to me, from reading previous discussions of events in Ukraine from Lobster and other, alternative news sources. As well as the fact that if Putin really did want to conquer all of Ukraine, he surely would have been able to do so, and not stopped with Crimea and the east.

Newton also wonders why we haven’t seen Sakwa, with his impressive command of Russian and eastern European history, in the media.

There can be very few academics now operating who possess Richard Sakwa’s expertise in modern Russian (including Soviet and post-Soviet) international history. Why, then, do we not seen more of him in the mainstream media, both broadcasting and print? He has been on RT, discussing the Skripal poisonings amongst other things (no doubt leading some to suspect him of being an apologist for Putin, which he certainly is not). But I have never seen him on (for example) BBC or Channel 4 (this does not of course mean he has never been interviewed there but it does suggest that any appearances have been somewhat limited). Why? Is this an accidental oversight, or are his opinions deemed by news and current affairs editors to be ‘unhelpful’?

That’s a very good question. My guess, given how the anti-Putin view is just about the only one accepted and promoted by the media, including Private Eye, is that current affairs editors really do see him as ‘unhelpful’. And this amounts, as Newton discusses at the beginning of his review, to fake news and fake history.

This is another excellent video from the public meeting of Labour Against the Witchhunt on the 29th January last year, 2019. LAW was founded to stand up for people, who had been unfairly targeted by the right in the Labour party for expulsion, chiefly, but not exclusively, on bogus charges of anti-Semitism. Although one young woman was suspended or expelled because – gasp! Shock! Horror! – She was a fan of the Foo Fighters! LAW’s chair is Jackie Walker, a Black, Jewish anti-racist activist, who was falsely accused of anti-Semitism. Here she introduces Professor Moshe Machover, a very well respected Israeli mathematician and a staunch critic of Zionism. Here he tells the story of how he was also smeared, expelled and re-admitted for ‘supporting another party/not supporting another party’.

Walker states that many people were uplifted when the NEC were forced to go back on their knee-jerk response and reinstate him. This happened because they were at the Labour party conference and the offending article that many have spoken about that Moshe wrote, which touched on some of the issues that Ken [Loach?] spoke about, was in a paper on the side. And Jeremy Newmark, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, came out, took a photo of them, smiled, and said something like ‘Well, we’ll have you now.’ Within hours Machover had been fingered. What is extraordinary is that in two years, 18 months, more people have been suspended and still do not know what the allegations against them are. It is extraordinary that at times, given that, Labour’s disciplinary unit can respond so quickly. She then hands over the Mike to Prof Machover.

Machover’s rather elderly, so he apologises for speaking from a sitting position. He states he wants to make a few technical points. It is not only about false allegations of anti-Semitism. There are two things that are combined, and in his case they were combined. The allegations of anti-Semitism are the most despicable, they are a form of character assassination. But they can only suspend you for it. They did not use that allegation to expel him. There is a more draconian rule that was used him against him and many other people, which has zilch to do with allegations of anti-Semitism. It is the infamous Rule 2.14.4b in the Labour party rule book. This allows the bureaucrats not to suspend, but to expel automatically. The procedure shares with the allegation of anti-Semitism the absence of natural justice. There is no due process. This is about who the accuser, the prosecution and the judge are. They are the same people: the committee that is expelling you or adjudicating in your suspension. They are the judges and the prosecution. You cannot cross-examine the witnesses. You cannot know who is accusing you. This applies to both cases. The draconian rule that allows automatic expulsion, or prevent you joining the party. Some of this would be just, if it was accompanied by due procedure, natural justice. For example, if you demand people vote for a rival candidate to a Labour candidate in an election. That would be a just case for expulsion. If someone is caught with a bloody knife over a corpse, they still have a trial. They’re not sent to prison automatically. Unlike this rule.

And some of the ground for automatic expulsion are absolutely absurd, a bureaucrat’s dream. This is membership or support for a political organisation not affiliated to the Labour party. But they do not define what a political organisation is. It could be Refuge. It could be Momentum [which was not at the time affiliated to the Labour party]. it could be anything. And what does ‘support’ mean? In Machover’s case, it was comical. Membership is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ thing. But what does ‘support’ mean? They accused him of supporting a rival organisation. Why did they pick on this organisation? They did not call for voting against Labour. On the contrary, they encouraged people to vote for Labour candidates. What does support me? It’s not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ issue. He supports some things, but not others. He says he did not respond to that part of the question when the bureaucrats wrote to him about it, because he didn’t really give him any definition of what support meant. When he was expelled, the evidence against him was the article he had published in the weekly journal of the CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain]. This is something a lot of people do. Jeremy Corbyn has published many articles in the Morning Star, a lot of Labour leaders have published articles in journals inimical to the Labour Party. When they grudgingly reinstated him they said that they construed his reply as evidence that he did not support this organisation. He did not admit or deny support, but they arbitrarily decided that first he did, then he didn’t. That shows the arbitrariness of the whole procedure.

Coming to the accusations of anti-Semitism, it is true, as Walker said, that the accusations started when Corbyn became a candidate. That was a shift of gear in a campaign that started a few years previously, which had little to do with the Labour party, Britain, or specifically Jeremy Corbyn. It is a campaign orchestrated by the Israeli government, specifically by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs led by the cabinet minister Gilad Erdan. This was a response to Israeli’s declining reputation and falling support internationally, among the left but also among liberal opinion, and particularly among the young, including young Jewish people. And so they decided to fight against it by accusing people who were against Israel and its crimes, and against the Zionist project of colonisation, branding them as anti-Semites. And the bastards fight dirty. You don’t need to go further than look at the al-Jazeera expose. He recommends that if you haven’t watched the four part series, you should, as he found it personally entertaining in a macabre way, but also import to see how the whole thing works. He then goes to make the following points:

The campaign against Corbyn by the right, including the Labour right, which still holds very important bureaucratic positions, latched onto it and used it as a cudgel against Corbyn. This was a confluence of those who believed in Israel almost like a religion, who were prepared to eat alive anyone who dared to make even the most justified criticism of Israel. This coincided with the people on the right, both inside and outside the Labour party, who care zilch about Israel, Palestinians and anti-Semitism. They just want to use anti-Semitism as a weapon against Jeremy Corbyn personally. This is combined with a characteristic of the elite, not just in this country, but generally in the international community, in what used to be called ‘the free world’. This is led by the United States, which is led by, you know who. And Israel is playing a very important role for the US, not only as their regional watchdog, but as their supplier globally of the hardware and software of mass repression, such as the drones used not just for reconaissance but also assassination. Israel is the United State’s rottweiler, which is at the head of the international community. And so if that rottweiler pisses on your shoe, you don’t kick it, but say ‘Good dog! Good dog!’

He then ends his talk with a remark about Momentum. Many branches of Momentum mobilised to pass resolutions in his defence and in the defence of other victims. But where are Momentum’s national leaders? John Lansman, Momentum’s leader, is on record as saying ‘You mustn’t mention Zionism.’ But you can’t open an Israeli paper without Zionism being discussed – ‘Is it consonant with Zionism, is it not consonant with Zionism?’ Zionism is the ideology of Israel. It is not possible to mention Israel without mentioning Zionism, like Communism was the ideology of the old Soviet Union. What stops the central leadership of Momentum from saying a word about this. He thinks they should raise this question.

After the departure of the nine Labour splitters, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, is up to his old tricks again trying to undermine Corbyn. Watson to my mind looks like the American comedian Greg Proops, but without any of Proops’ wit, personality or charisma. He’s a Blairite, who is now trying to use the splitters’ departure to try to get his old chums back onto the front bench, develop a separate back bench power base, and then purge Corbyn’s supporters on the pretext that they’re anti-Semites.

Watson was on the Andrew Marr show to peddle his malign views on Sunday. He claimed that he had received 50 complaints of anti-Semitic abuse from MPs, and that he had passed them on to Corbyn. Now today I read in the Metro that he was demanding to be allowed to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism as well as the party secretary, Jenny Formby, because Formby allegedly wasn’t dealing with them quickly enough.

Yesterdays I, for Monday, 25th February 2019, quoted Watson as saying

‘I think he [Corbyn] needs to take a personal lead on examining those cases and, if necessary, recommend to our [ruling body]NEC what has to be done.

‘The test for him as a leader is to eradicate anti-Semitism. It is not Labour party members, who will be the judge of that, it is the British Jewish community.’

He also demanded a reshuffle of the front bench to represent a greater range of views, saying

‘If there isn’t one, I think I’d need to give a platform for my colleagues who want their ideas to be listened to by the current Shadow Cabinet’.

The I’s report about his intention to set up a back-bench group of MPs, ‘Splintering: Deputy leader to set up backbench group’, runs as follows

A new grouping of Labour MPs who are disillusioned with the party’s direction under Jeremy Corbyn is being set up by his deputy Tom Watson.

Its launch, which is expected within a fortnight, is aimed at preventing the trickle of defections of MPs to The Independent Group from becoming a flood.

But the faction will also inevitably be seen as a rival power based to Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. I understands that organisers hope to attract more than 100 backbenchers into the group, which will appoint spokespeople and work on policy initiatives.

Meetings will be held within days to gauge the level of support for the group.

‘We need to assert ourselves more than we have done in the last two years,’ said one MP.

Mr Watson said he wanted to ‘give a platform’ to Labour MPs who felt excluded by the leadership.

‘My central point is that the social democratic voice has to be heard, because that is the only way you keep the Labour party unified and prohibit other colleagues from potentially leaving the PLP_ [Parliamentary Labour Party]. The situation is serious,’ he told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.

Of course, Watson denies he is rebelling. The previous article in the I quoted him as saying that he was ‘standing up for pluralism in the party’.

This is just lies and doubletalk. Watson and the 100 MPs he wants to recruit are obviously Blairites, indignant at being forced out of power. They’ve been intriguing against the Labour leader ever since he came to power. They’ve threatened to leave several times before, just as they’ve tried to oust him as leader. But Corbyn is genuinely popular with the Labour grassroots activists, and his policies are immensely popular with the public. Which puts Watson and his fellow plotters in an awkward position: no-one wants their shoddy, mouldy neoliberal economics any longer. People are sick and tired of Labour trying to copy to the Tories as Blair and his coterie did. And the Blairites themselves were a small minority within the party. They dominated it because they seized control of party bureaucracy, just as Stalin and his supporters were able to seize control of the Communist apparat in the former Soviet Union. These backbench MPs may claim to be defending a plurality of views, but they only views they’re interested in defending and promoting are their own. Not Corbyn’s, and not anyone else’s in the party.

As for claiming to be Social Democrats, this is a sick joke. The Social Democratic tendency in the Labour party was the creation of Anthony Crosland. Crosland didn’t want further nationalisation, because he felt it was unnecessary. Its benefits, he felt, could be obtained instead through progressive taxation, strong trade unions and social mobility. Well, thanks to Thatcherism, social mobility stopped under Blair. In fact, I think under the Tories it’s even been reversed, so that for the first time since the late 19th century Marx’s statement that the middle class are being forced down into the working class is true, at least as far as middle class poverty goes. Similarly, Blair, as a Thatcherite, hated the trade unions and passed legislation aimed at destroying their power. With their acquiescence, it should be said. As for progressive taxation, they’re against that as well. Aaron Bastani quoted an interview in last week’s New Scientist with Chris Leslie in his article on the corrupt, compromised policies of the Independent Group. Leslie had said that he was not in favour of a 50 per cent tax rate. This was the tax rate set by Gordon Brown. And I don’t doubt Leslie was alone. My guess is that a number of the Blairites, who still remain in the Labour party, have the same noxious views.

Watson and the other Blarites aren’t Social Democrats: they’re Red Tories, Thatcherites. Any other description of them is a lie.

As for the anti-Semitism allegations, my guess is that it’s just more smears of people supporting Corbyn and standing up for the Palestinians. And when Watson says that Labour will be judged by the Jewish community, he’s not talking about the Jewish community as a whole. He’s talking about the Tory, Zionist Jewish establishment. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is monstrously right-wing and which is an explicitly Zionist organisation. An organisation which is morally corrupt and deeply compromised. How else can you describe an organisation which issued nauseating, spurious justifications for the IDF shooting unarmed Gazans last year? Which excludes Orthodox and secular Jews? And which howled with rage when Corbyn spent a Pesach (Passover) seder with the socialists of Jewdas, and claimed this was an insult to the Jewish community?

And the same is to be said about the Chief Rabbinate. The former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, caused shock and outrage when he called Reform Jews ‘enemies of the faith’, like a medieval inquisitor about to launch an auto-da-fe against heretics and Jews. He also considered homosexuality to be a terrible sin and warned his congregation not to join a gay rights march, until he later changed his mind, that is. And he led a contingent of Jewish British thugs to Israel to join the March of the Flags. That’s the day when Israeli ultra-nationalists march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem vandalising their homes and businesses and threatening and intimidating them. I see no difference between it, and Tommy Robinson and his odious crew marching into British Muslim communities, or Mosley and the British Union of Fascists goose-stepping into the Jewish community in the East End in the 1930s. And when the Jewish community held their rallies last summer against Corbyn, organised by the Board and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, those attending including members and supporters of the Fascist organisations Kach, the Jewish Defence League, and the English Defence League Jewish Division.

Similarly, Watson’s declaration that he wants to assist in dealing with cases of anti-Semitism cases means that he’s unhappy with Formby’s handling of it for other reasons. He wants more Cobynites thrown out through the same spurious reasons that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism and that describing Israeli plotting to determine who should be in the cabinet as a ‘conspiracy’ is the same as reviving the smears on Jews as a whole of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Oh yes, and that showing a photoshopped image of a Jobcentre with the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on it is another terrible anti-Semitic smear, rather than a justifiable description of the murderous policies of the DWP.

And his demand to decide these cases personally is the precise same tactic Stalin used when he gained power. Before Stalin became leader of the Soviet Communist party, the post of General Secretary was a relatively unimportant position. His comrades thought he was thick, and so gave him the job thinking that he would satisfied purging it of all the drunks and seducers. But as well as getting rid of them, he was also using it to purge his enemies’ supporters and fill it with his own. He’s supposed to have said of the power of elections, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes’.

Watson is a typical Blairite. He follows Blair and the others as a destructive neoliberal, who wants absolute obedience to a highly centralised, dictatorial party elite. It is not Corbyn and his supporters who should be thrown out, but him and his.

The Tories must really be in trouble. Not only are their supporters claiming they’re ahead in the polls, based simply on the evidence of one poll, and their fellow travelers in the Labour party are talking of quitting because of anti-Semitism, yet again, but the Tory press is now trying to run another Red Scare campaign.

This type of anti-Labour propaganda began with the Zinovieff letter in the 1920s. This purported to be a letter from the head of the Comintern in Communist Russia urging Labour to turn Britain into Communist state. It may have cost Labour the election that year, though some historians have suggested that Labour would have lost anyway and the letter itself didn’t make much difference. It certainly didn’t come from the Soviet Union, but was cooked up much closer to home by MI5.

In 1987 when Thatcher was up against Neil Kinnock, the Tory press ran it again. This time they claimed that there was a group of Labour MPs, who were secret Communists. If Labour was elected, they would oust Kinnock, seize power and turn Britain into a Communist state. The Scum also ran a double page spread of various left-wing Labour MPs, like Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott, with quotes underneath them intended to scare the public into believing they were dealing with the ‘loony left’, as the Tories called them. The quote purporting to come from Red Ken had him saying that he didn’t believe in the British army, but in a worker’s army to guard the factories. And Diane Abbott was supposed to have said that ‘all White people are racist’. At the same time, the Tory press had been loudly telling everyone that Livingstone was a Marxist. Those who knew him made it clear that he wasn’t. He could sound like them on occasions, and was quite willing to use them. But he was never a Communist. So it’s a fair bet that Livingstone and Abbott may never have made the comments the Scum attributed to them, or if they did, they were ripped out of context. In any case there was no secret cabal of Commies within the Labour party plotting to seize power and turn us into the UKSSR.

Not that it stopped one of the Thatcher’s favourite novelists, Frederick Forsythe, writing another thriller based on this premise. This was about MI5 working to prevent Moscow turning Britain into a Soviet satellite through a group of infiltrators, who had worked their way into a Labour party headed by someone, who bore more than a little similarity to Michael Foot.

Now it seems the Tories are running the same scare tactics again. Zelo Street today has put up a very interesting piece about historian Giles Udy, who issued a series of Tweets promoting a forthcoming article in Tory political magazine Standpoint. Udy claims that Labour has a ‘shadow manifesto’ which states that capitalism has taken Britain to the abyss and only the seizure of power by the working class can save us. This document predicts that this revolution will be opposed by a Fascist dictatorship run by industrialists and newspaper editors, which will start a White Terror with death squads. This will only be avoided if the police, civil service, armed forces, security services and the judicial system are purged and replaced with supporters of the revolution. The lower ranks will be sent for re-education.

This is, of course, all twaddle. Zelo Street makes it clear that if you actually look at the article, you’ll find that the document in question doesn’t come from Labour. Not at all. It comes from the Communist Party of Britain’s 25,000 word piece, Britain’s Road to Socialism. This might actually cause a problem for a real journalist or historian, who would be well aware that this very obviously does not come from the Labour party. Udy tries to wave this objection away by saying that the words ‘socialist’, ‘democratic socialist’ and ‘communist’ are virtually interchangeable to describe followers of Marx. As Zelo Street remarks, they aren’t at all, and this is fraudulent in the extreme.

In fact, Udy has previous in trying to smear Corbyn and other members of the Labour party as agents of Moscow. In February last year he issued a series of Tweets touting an article by him in the Torygraph. This was at the time the Tory press were claiming that Corbyn had passed information on to the Czech secret service, despite the fact that he didn’t. Udy claimed that Corby and Abbott must have met party officials when they went on holiday in the former DDR, and that the Stasi would have preserved records of these meetings. Except that Corbyn and Abbott didn’t meet anyone from Honecker’s ruling party, and the Stasi didn’t have any records of them doing so. Those facts did not deter Udy. He claimed that he didn’t believe Corbyn had taken money from the East Germans, but he was only one of various deluded members of the Labour party, who were admirers of socialist totalitarianism, and lamented the fact that Blair’s revolution hadn’t cleaned them all out. The other high-ranking Labour figure and trade unionist, who had taken Soviet money, he claimed, was Jack Jones, the former head of the Transport and General Workers Union, now Unite. He also claimed that Jones’ wife had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. This was all bilge. He only had one source for this nonsense, and that was the Soviet defector and liar Oleg Gordievsky. But Jones and his wife were safely dead, and so couldn’t sue.

Udy was supposed to be a historian of the gulags, and was respected on the Right supposedly for his insight into the Labour party and Soviet Union. But Zelo Street said that after this article, he squandered whatever little credibility he had, and was just a paranoid fraud. ‘So no change there’.

None whatsoever. When things get tough for the Tories, run a scare story about them and Communism. This posed a problem when Blair was in power, as he was as right-wing as they were. They solved it then by published various fictions predicting that sometime in the next decade the remains of the European socialist parties would united with the Muslims to start a new Holocaust of European Jews. Frederick Raphael reviewed a book, which had this as its theme, set in France, around about 2004 in the Spectator as I recall. Now that they’ve got a real left-winger to fear and smear in the case of Corbyn, they’ve dropped all the stuff about Islam and are going back to Communism.

As for Standpoint itself, it’d be very interesting to know what connections it has, if any, with the British or American secret state. When the roughly left leaning political magazine, Prospect, first appeared about a decade or so ago, Lobster noted that it was more than a little like Encounter, another political mag from the ’60s – ’70s that was revealed to have been financed by the CIA. The right-wing press in this country has been running articles from the British secret state. It’s therefore quite possible that British intelligence or one of its nominally independent subsidiaries has been feeding it bilge about the Labour party as well. Like the smears against Corbyn and other British, American and European political figures claiming they were agents of Putin by the Integrity Initiative.

Which brings us right back to MI5 and the Zinoviev letter. And how old and shopworn the Tories’ smear tactics are.

Last Wednesday, the 19th December 2018, Mike put up a truly alarming article. May, he reported, was planning on putting 3,500 squaddies on the streets of Britain if the country crashed out of the EU without a deal.

Mike in his article made the point that it looks like the Tories are desperate to get the country out of Europe before new tax legislation comes in, which would force the millionaires she serves to pay more tax. It’s a very strong argument. The only reason we are due to leave the EU on the date May set is because May set it. If negotiations with the EU take longer to secure a deal, it’s possible for May to postpone it. But she clearly doesn’t want that. And Tory policy, and for that matter, New Labour’s, has been for us to become a low wage tax haven off Europe, for the benefit of the extremely rich. Hence the continuing scandal of the City of London becoming one of the major centres of global money laundering. For further information, see the ‘In the City’ column in Private Eye.

Mike also commented that May appeared to be deliberately running down the clock to Brexit, perhaps due to being deliberately influenced with the hard right European Research Group and Jacob Rees-Mogg. And low taxes mean that not enough money is available for social policies that benefit ordinary people. Mike therefore concluded that

Put these elements together and it may be easier to understand why Mrs May is planning to deploy 3,500 soldiers onto the streets of the UK in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit. Martial law would preserve her government – sorry, dictatorship – against the civil unrest that her policies seem certain to provoke.

Mike then supports his conclusion with further arguments – that Tweezer knows she’s on borrowed time, but is determined to cling on to power, that the government wishes her to stay in power to continue the harm she’s doing to our country and society, and the complicity of the media in this, distracting the country in order to stop them realizing how they are being stripped of their rights and forced into debt.

Mike’s commenters are also extremely alarmed at the idea of Tweezer calling in the armed forces, and some of their comments are very well worth reading. Dan Delion, for example, said

If you want to know what may be in the pipeline, I urge you to read part 2 (Emergency Powers) of the Civil Contingency Act 2004 (it’s not long ~ 10pp) which describes the legislatiion that already exists – set up by Tony Blair, as it happens.
This is nothing to do with the replacememnt for Emergency Planning (that’s part 1 of said Act), but is intended to deal with any form of civil strife – just like Brexit.. Makes me wonder if May found what was up her sleeve and has been planning to keep the law in reserve, just in case Remoaners (or any other bodies) get uppity!

This really is monstrous. The last time I can remember the army being called on to the streets of Britain was back in the 1970s, when there was a widespread fear that the country was on the verge of collapse, mostly due to strikes. And members of the establishment, including the Times and the editor of the Mirror, were definitely planning a coup in the mid-70s to overthrow Harold Wilson’s minority Government. This was partly because he was feared – and smeared by MI5 – as a KGB agent. Ken Livingstone discusses the proposed coup in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. Left-wing activists, including journalists, were to be rounded up and interned in one of the islands off Scotland. This was no mere fantasy. Francis Wheen also describes the proposed coup and the plotters in his book, Strange Days: Paranoia in the ’70s. And Lobster has discussed several times MI5’s smears against Wilson.

The plotters did try to get the generals at Sandhurst interested, but they did their duty to Queen and country instead and send them packing. but there is nevertheless a real threat there. The Trotskyite writer, Ernest Mandel, in his book From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (New York: Schocken Books 1978) argued that democratically elected socialist and Marxist regimes have always been prevented from fully carrying out their dismantlement of big capital by the military. Mandel’s book is an attack on the ‘Eurocommunist’ direction western European Marxist took as they broke from the Stalinism and rigidly bureaucratic politics of the Soviet Union and turned instead to democratic elections and multiparty politics. It was a strategy intended to avoid a violent confrontation between the workers and capital. Mandel writes

Now, the essential aim of the Eurocommunist strategy is precisely to avert this confrontation at any price. Its capacity to influence the behaviour of the bourgeoisie, however, is virtually nil. The coups of Kapp, Mola-Franco, De Gaulle, Pinochet and Eanes have never been warded off by the pledges of Ebert-Noske, Otto Wels, Prieto, Thorez, Allende, or Mario Soares that the army is ‘national’ and ‘democratic’ and ‘stands above the class struggle’ and ‘respects the constitution’. (pp. 196-7).

The Kapp putsch was an attempt by parts of the army to overthrow the Weimar coalition government of post-WW I Germany headed by Ebert, the head of the SDP, the German equivalent of the Labour party. Thorez was the head of the Communist party in France when De Gaulle briefly seized power to govern by decree. Allende was the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile who was overthrown by Pinochet. General Franco was the Fascist leader of Spain, who overthrew the Republican government. I’m not familiar with the other names. Mandel is here discussing Marxist politicians, who were unable to stave off coups or coup attempts. Jeremy Corbyn very definitely isn’t a Marxist, but the Tories and mainstream media have been trying to smear him and his followers as Communists, Trotskyites and Stalinists. I can easily believe that some Tories would want him overthrown militarily if he did become prime minister.

I was talking a few months ago to one of the priests at our church, who also has strong left-wing beliefs. He lived and ministered for a long time in Australia, and told me that he wondered if Corbyn would ever be allowed to take power. He considered it possible that the Tories here would do what their counterparts Down Under did. They invoked the Queen to have the definitely democratically elected Gough Whitlam removed from office. I think if that happened here, it would utterly discredit the monarchy, though I can see a very carefully crafted story being concocted by the political establishment and the media to justify such an outrageous abuse of the monarchical prerogative.

And even if May’s preparations to put the army on the streets in the event of a No Deal Brexit is only to prevent rioting, there’s still more than element of self-interest about it. It was rioting over the poll tax in 1989 that forced Thatcher to retire, even though she won the vote of No Confidence in the Tory party with a slightly higher majority than Tweezer. And she nearly went eight or nine years previously, in 1981-2, with the rioting then.

And she clearly is concerned that rioting will occur if Britain leaves the EU without some kind of deal. Rioting no doubt caused by lack of food, medicine and other essential services caused by her shoddy negotiations with the EU.

May is a direct threat to British democracy, and the lives and livelihoods of Britain’s citizens. She works only for the rich, and would like to use the army to keep herself in power. Just like Thatcher’s friend, the mass murderer and torturer General Pinochet, and the other Latin American fascists the Tories supported.

This is another video from the Boston-based Real News network. It’s a report on the steady march towards the extreme right by the Polish government’s Law and Justice party, and their collaboration with Fascism and Holocaust revisionism. The country’s a member of the EU and NATO, and is bitterly hostile to Russia, from whom it has requested America provide protection. Donald Trump is thus considering building a new NATO base there, named after himself. Naturally.

The video discusses the march through Warsaw last month, November, 2018, to commemorate the centenary of Poland’s independence. 200,000 people attended. The march was, however, initially organized by the Far Right, and attended by extreme right-wing groups from all over Europe. The march was then co-sponsored by the government, and the president, Andzrei Duda, marched in front of a number of explicitly Fascist organisations.

The programme talks about this with Dr. Dovid Katz, an academic specializing in the rise of Fascism in eastern Europe, who is rightly alarmed by these developments. He states that Fascism exists in many countries, but it bodes badly for democracy when the government partners with it. He describes how the Polish government has been increasingly taking the country towards Fascism. Katz says that this is ‘so sad’ because Poland was the first major country invaded by Hitler, with no disrespect to Czechoslovakia. It’s thus particularly alarming to see Nazis marching on Poland’s hallowed national day, along with the president and thousands of other, non-Nazi people, who nevertheless felt comfortable marching with the Far Right. He pays tribute to the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who tried to prevent the march from going ahead, but was overruled by the rest of the council. As well as leading politicians, the Groaniad reported that the Polish armed forces also marched side by side with Fascist organisations like the National-Radical Camp, or ONR, the successor to a pre-War anti-Semitic organization, as well as the Italian Fascist organization, Forza Nuova.

Gronkiewicz-Waltz apparently came from the Centrist party, but her attempt to ban the march was overturned by Duda, who announced that it would go ahead as the Rightists had originally planned. A court also overturned the ban, effectively combining the government and Fascist marches. The government put a cordon of military police between the two marches, but Katz argues that this really did nothing to distance the government from the Fascists. Katz states that the governments collaborating with the Far Right, such as those in the three Baltic states, use similar tactics, but they don’t morally make any difference. He makes the point that on this sacred day, the government is showing that it’s in solidarity with people who believe in Aryan purity, who hate Jews, Blacks, Roma and gays. In other words, all the same people the Nazis hated.

The documentary notes that the Law and Justice party began as a nominally centre right party with a strong Christian orientation. Since taking power in 2015 it has moved further right. This year, 2018, it purged the supreme court of a third of its members, and reappointed their successors in October, provoking protests. It has also become increasingly nationalistic. Katz states that as centre-right party, it was ostensibly like the British Tories and American Republicans. But its far-right character has been revealed by its neutralization of democracy through the attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He states that it’s to Poland’s credit that there is a vibrant opposition which has led to the situation being covered, unlike similar events in the Baltic states.

But parallel to the attacks on democracy is the rise of ethnic nationalism and an emphasis on the racial purity of the Polish people. This has also come with a rise in anti-Semitism. The video shows a clipping from a newspaper report about a hostel that declared that it was only for Poles, Jews were forbidden. This is despite the majority of Polish having been either killed or fled during the Holocaust. In February this year, Duda passed a law criminalizing the mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. This effectively made Holocaust revisionism mandatory, and anyone who discussed the reality of Polish complicity in the Holocaust could be jailed for up to three years. Katz states that it is important to recognize that most Poles aren’t anti-Semites and never were. In the case of the Holocaust, a quarter of the Righteous Gentiles, the rescuers of Jews, in Europe during the Nazi era came from Poland. He also states that for hundreds of years, the Polish kingdom and then the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth provided a haven for Jews and other minorities. But these new Fascist forces are tapping into the worst forms of Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, which also had a deep anti-Semitic theological tradition built into them, which the Nazis were easily able to exploit. And the term ‘Christian’ here is being used as a dog-whistle for ‘ethnic Poles’. Katz states that Poland is a very ethnically homogenous country. There is no challenge to Polish ethnic identity. It’s the Far Right attempt to create and exploit problems, which don’t exist. And the real victims of this attempt to create a Fascist state are the Poles.

Katz goes on to say that Poland was different from the Baltic states and western Ukraine, in that it was the victim of the Nazis, and so has nothing to fake history about. The law banning any discussion of Polish involvement in the Holocaust was also expressed in blatantly anti-Semitic terms. In the Baltic states, however, the wording of similar laws is much more deceptive. The equivalent law in Ukraine talks about equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes. Which means that if someone says that only the Nazis committed genocide, and that the Soviet crimes, as horrific as they were, don’t constitute genocide, then they can be sent to prison. In Latvia this is five years, 2 years in Lithuania, three in Hungary and 10 in Ukraine.

The international outcry that followed the passage of Poland’s Holocaust law forced the government to amend it to make it less severe and remove the jail sentences. But this problem isn’t confined to Poland. Katz is a member of the web journal, Defending History, which tracks Holocaust revisionism in eastern Europe. They stress that Fascism is appearing elsewhere in eastern European NATO member states. The anti-Semitism in the Baltic isn’t overt – the government sponsors Jewish plaques, conferences and memorials, but there is still the Fascist emphasis on ethnic purity and the desire to falsify the history of the Holocaust.

Katz is an excellent speaker, who clearly has a deep respect for Poland and its people. He’s also right about Poland providing a refuge for the Jews during the centuries of persecution. And there are monuments in Poland to those, who helped the Jews in the Holocaust.

Poland was the victim of genocide and ethnic cleansing under the Nazis. Hitler himself said that the war against the Poles would be one of extermination. Of the gentile Christians, who were persecuted by the Nazis, the majority were Polish Roman Catholics. The Nazis despised the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe as non-Aryan subhumans. The handbooks issued to the Hitler Youth urging them to keep themselves racially pure had diagrams showing the typical features of the peoples of Europe. Those of the Slavic peoples, beginning with the Poles, are shown has becoming increasingly east Asian, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes, until they finally merge into those of the peoples of China and the other Asian countries.

Nevertheless, there is a deep strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in these countries that is being exploited. I wonder how much of the trend towards Fascism in Poland is being driven by the same economic and psychological forces behind the rise of the Far Right in Hungary. Poland’s another state that had to fight for its independence against domination by the German, Austiran and Russian Empires, and was threatened by the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and expansionism from the 15th to 17th centuries. I’m left wondering if the Polish people also suffered through the collapse of Communism, like those of Russia and Hungary. And if they also, like Hungary, were badly hit by the 2008 financial crash.

And despite their affected concern with defending Jews from anti-Semitism, Israel and its lobbyists in Britain will not attack the Polish government. Because Poland, like Ukraine and Hungary, has bought Israeli arms. Thus Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in the pages of the Guardian to deny that the Law and Justice Party was anti-Semitic, because they were good friends of Israel.

One of our uncles was Polish, a man who worked his way across Europe from Germany to France until he came to Britain. He was a decent man, who worked hard to support his family. It’s horrifying that his country is going down the same path towards Fascism, and that Nazism is rising again in eastern Europe with connivance of these nations’ governments.

Everyone in the West has to join together to fight it, before it undermines all of western civilization.

One of the charges laid against Mike by the Blairites and the Israel lobbyists in the Labour party was that he accused British Jews of being more loyal to a foreign state or their own people than other Brits. This, they argued, followed the classic pattern of anti-Semitism.

It’s certainly true that anti-Semitism does see Jews as more loyal to each other or to a foreign state than that in which they reside and of which they are citizens. It’s the basis of the ‘Stab in the Back’ myth that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany: that Germany’s defeat in the First World War was due to the secret machinations of the Jews. There were similar anti-Semitic conspiracy theories going around Britain at the same time, directed against Anglo-German Jewish industrialists like Mond. It is the central idea behind the grand anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, that the Jews are in control of both capitalism and communism/socialism, and using both to enslave and destroy non-Jews. The White race is to be destroyed through immigration and intermarriage with non-Whites.

I’ve shown ad nauseam that Mike is not, and never has been, an anti-Semite, and has always regarded such conspiracy theories as vile, pernicious, murderous rubbish. That this accusation, directed at supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, is completely bogus is also clearly demonstrated by the fact that it was also leveled at Cyril Chilson. Chilson is a naturalized Brit of Israeli extraction, who served in the IDF and its propaganda unit. His mother was a Holocaust survivor, and his father an airman in the Soviet air force fighting the Nazis. Who also murdered his entire family. It is outrageous that this man in particular should have been smeared as an anti-Semite. Just as it is outrageous that so many other decent, anti-racist people, including Jews, Blacks and other Brits, who’ve been the subject of racial abuse and assault, and who may also have lost relatives to real Fascism and Nazism, have been smeared as anti-Semites.

But as I’ve shown in a previous article, the Israeli state and Zionism is very similar to Italian Fascism in that both Netanyahu’s Likud government and Mussolini’s Fascists have attempted to use members of their ethnic group or nation resident abroad to promote their countries’ interests. In the case of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists, this was the Italian communities around the world. And the Nazis attempted to use expatriate Germans in the same way. Robert A. Brady describes this in the table summarizing the main features of Nazi economics and ideology in his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937), pp. 41-2.

On page 42, he writes

13. Non-Germans cannot be citizens; as a corollary, all Germans residing outside Germany either belong or owe allegiance to the Third Reich.

Israel was founded as the Jewish state, and under the law of return, only Jews may immigrate to become citizens of Israel with full rights. Furthermore, Netanyahu himself passed legislation a month or so ago declaring Israel to be ‘the national state of the Jewish people’, an advance on previous legislation which declared that all Jews, everywhere, were automatically citizens of Israel. It was ridiculed and criticized severely by Jewish anti-racists and pro-Palestinian activists. One Jewish American from Anchorage in Alaska posted a piece on YouTube making it very clear that he thought it was ridiculous that he, who had never even seen Israel, was now a citizen, while his Palestinian friend, who was born there, was not. And it is certainly true that Israel demands the supreme loyalty of all Jews, regardless of where they live. Diaspora Jews, who wish to continue living in their traditional homelands and vocally reject Zionism are denounced as ‘traitors’ and worse. And the Zionist activists, who collaborated with Shai Masot in seeking to determine who should be members of the Tory cabinet clearly were members of a conspiracy and did put the interests of a foreign country above their own. And it doesn’t matter how loudly Maggie Cousins, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism or Labour’s NEC howls ‘anti-Semitism’ at the mere mention of this. It is still true.

But it is obviously not true of all Jews, just one section of the Zionist movement, which is concerned to close down all criticism of Israel through clandestine political manipulation and spurious and mendacious accusations of anti-Semitism.

As directed by Netanyahu and the Likudniks, the Zionist movement is acting very much like the Nazis and Italian Fascists wished their compatriots abroad to behave: as promoters and servants of their ideology, whose loyalty was to the Fatherland, rather than the peoples with whom they lived. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism declares that it is anti-Semitic to compare Jews with the Nazis, but in this instance, as regards Zionism and its collaborators, as in so many other areas of Israeli policy, the comparison is accurate. And the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is itself pernicious in that it is deliberately being used to deny these similarities, and silence those who point them out as anti-Semites.

Every now and then a Conservative defender of capitalism tries to argue that Nazism and Fascism were forms of Socialism. Jonah Goldberg tried it a few years ago in his book, Liberal Fascism, a Tory MP stood up in the European parliament a couple of weeks ago and made the same accusation, though he had to take it back and apologise. And Private Eye in recent weeks have also published a couple of letters from readers making the same claims.

Fascism did have Socialistic elements. Mussolini was originally a radical Socialist, who broke with the rest of the Italian Socialist movement in supporting Italy joining the First World War. The Fascist party was originally extremely left-wing in its programme of 1919. Its corporativism was not only based on the ideas of the right-wing Italian Nationalists, but also from part of the syndicalist movement, which moved away from demanding absolute workers’ control to advocating an industrial structure which included both capitalists and workers in a series of corporations set up to govern each industry, or sector of the economy. The Nazis also included socialist elements in their 1922 programme, such as the nationalization of firms and profit-sharing in industry, as well as the break-up of the department stores.

However, the Fascists and Nazis came to power through their alliance with business and the aristocracy. Both the Italian Fascists and Nazis in Germany were hostile to socialism, communism and workers’ trade unions. In Italy, they also allied with the Vatican to destroy the Populists, a party set up to represent Italian Roman Catholics against persecution by the Liberal state, which was distrusted by the Papacy because they considered it too radical. Once in power, the socialist elements of these parties’ programmes was soon jettisoned. Hitler declared that he had no intention of nationalizing businesses, unless they were badly run. He had the SA massacred in the Night of the Long Knives because this part of the Nazi party did take the socialist elements of party programme seriously. The word ‘socialist’ had only been included in the name of the Nazi party – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – against bitter opposition by some of its founders. Hitler stated that he did so in order to steal potential recruits from the real left-wing parties. Furthermore, the Nationalist intellectuals who first advocated a right-wing ‘socialist’ order in the 1920s stated that they did not refer to the nationalization of industry, but to the socialization of people to serve the state. And just before the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler made a speech to German industry stating that Nazism would protect private industry.

Robert A. Brady, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, made the capitalist nature of the Nazi regime very clear in his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937). The book is a thorough description of German society under the Nazis – its ideology, social structure, the coordination of science, industry and agriculture, the instruments of power and the various party organisations used to recruit and control the masses. Brady states

The regime which the Nazis proceeded to establish is fairly described, by the very nature of the major interest which sponsored it, as adictatorship of monopoly capitalism. Its “fascism” is that of business enterprise organized on a monopoly basis, and in full command of all the military, police, legal and propaganda power of the state. (p. 33, emphasis in the original). He lays out the essential capitalist nature of the Nazi state as follows on pages 41-2.

1. Productive Property and natural resources are to be privately owned; freedom of contract is guaranteed (excepting to “aliens” and the peasants under the Inheritance laws).
2. Individual initiative, the business entrepreneur, conduct of business for profit (“reward for services performed”), and ownership (individual or stockholder) control are basic.
3. Business men are to be free, if “responsible” (“self-government in business”), to fix by agreement prices, production totals and quotas, marketing areas, and the conditions and terms of purchase and sale.
4. Stock and commodity exchanges, commission houses, brokers, and speculative transactions are inevitable and necessary for the conduct of “organic business.” (Business as usual.)
5. Heavy industries, particularly those catering to the military and foreign trade, are encouraged; large-scale units, unless “uneconomical” are to be kept intact; co-operatives are to be broken up.
6. The social class structure of society is sanctified, strengthened, made semi-hereditary, and hardened into caste lines (Standestaat, class state); the “Middle Class” are the Myrmidons of the Elite (Fuhrerstaat, leader state) and, as such, the backbone of the state.
7. Employers have practically complete control over workmen in regard to wages, hours, and working conditions. They must “take care” of their workmen-i.e. see that they are fed and do not grumble.
8. Collective bargaining is completely abolished; strikes are illegal; trade unions are forbidden; requests for wage increases are lese majeste.9. Control is completely from on top; there is and can be no such thing as control or discussion of policies from below; the “leaders” decide all things as they see fit; each holds appointed office for indefinite periods at the will of his superior.
10. The National Socialist Party and the German State are one and inseparable, as spirit and body. Legislative, executive, and judicial authorities are fused together. The central government controls all local government and all activities in all their details.
11. Civil and military are fused together; as in the military there can be no freedom of speech, of assembly, of writing, of acting, of “thoughts.” “Anyone may grumble or criticize the government who is not afraid to go to a concentration camp.” (Goebbels).
12. Germany must be made self-sufficient at all costs. (Autarkie).13. Non-Germans cannot be citizens; as a corollary, all Germans residing outside Germany either belong or owe allegiance to the Third Reich.
14 Communism (Bolshevism, Marxism) is the major enemy. There can be no such thing as equality of rights, opportunities, or income for classes, races, or sexes. The “broad masses” are fools and must be duped and led to meet the purposes of the elite (Herrenstaat). Class war is the major crime; material rewards for the rank and file sheer folly.
15. All sciences and “culture” must be co-ordinated and made to serve the purposes of the “leader,” “total,” “corporate” “master” (Herren)state. propaganda is the method. Propaganda knows neither right nor wrong, neither truth nor falsehood, but only what it wants.

In fact, business autonomy was severely limited by the imposition of the apparatus of state planning as Nazi Germany became a centrally planned economy similar to the Soviet Union, though in the case of Germany and Fascist Italy the economy was still very definitely capitalist private industry. Brady also goes on to discuss in his book how the Nazis celebrated and lauded the businessman as biologically superior through their social Darwinist ideology, and made sure that the leaders of industry, whether state-owned or private, were all drawn from the private sector.

Nazi rhetoric was anti-capitalist, but by this they meant free trade, which they identified with the Jews, just as they claimed the Jews were behind Socialism, Communism, the trade unions and other left-wing movements. They also borrowed some elements from Communism. Fellow Germans were ‘national comrades’, rather like the Marxist use of the term ‘comrade’ to describe a fellow Communist.

However, it is clear from this that Nazism was deeply Conservative and capitalist in its economic and social policies, and bitterly anti-socialist. It had socialist elements, but they were not taken seriously and only ever used as propaganda against the genuinely socialist parties and organisations. Any description of the Nazis as really socialist is utterly false and a lie, a rhetorical attempt to discredit contemporary socialism through guilt by association, and must be seen as such.

As Mike pointed out in his description of the kangaroo court, which fraudulently decided he was an anti-Semite, its head, Maggie Cousins, has form in these proceedings. She was the head of the kangaroo court that expelled the committed anti-racism campaigner, Marc Wadsworth, for anti-Semitism despite his work with the Board of Deputies of British Jews formulating legislation to combat the BNP and their genuinely anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in the ’80s and ’90s. And she was head of the kangaroo court that expelled Cyril Chilson, a naturalized Brit from Israel, also for anti-Semitism.

I found Mr. Chilson’s account of his kangaroo court on Labour Briefing for the 23rd April 2018. It’s entitled ‘From the IDF to the NCC’. Chilson explains that he came to this country in 1996 to study ancient history as a postgraduate student at Brasenose College, Oxford. He had previously spent 16 years in the Israeli Defence Force. In his last post there, he had been a foreign press liaison at the IDF spokesman unit. His duties were to whitewash the atrocities he’d seen committed by the Israeli armed forces, and spoonfeed information to foreign journos.

His experiences in the military, and his own strong socialist beliefs led him to join the Peace Now movement and the now defunct Israeli socialist party, MAPAM. He states, however, that it was only in Britain that he finally came to realise the true objectives of the Israeli state, which was the colonization of Palestine.

He became a naturalized British citizen in 2006, and joined the Labour party during Gordon Brown’s brief tenure of No. 10, because he was afraid of the Tories being re-elected. He considered them exactly the same as the Israeli far-right Likud party. And he welcome the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015. Soon after that, that media became swamped with anti-Corbyn propaganda. His experience within the Israeli propaganda machine allowed him to recognize it very clearly as ‘Hasbara’ – Israeli state civilian propaganda, which is coordinated from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. He was particular watchful about the anonymous accounts, which appeared on Twitter spreading false anti-Semitism accusations. These were also made against him and his family. They included an appeal to the Oxford College at which Chilson teaches to have him sacked.

He makes it clear that the charges of anti-Semitism against him are particularly grotesque, as his mother was saved from death in the concentration camps at the very last minute. His father was a member of the Soviet air force, whose own family were also murdered by the Nazis.

But Labour charged him with anti-Semitism was his criticism of Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians in its apartheid system, its occupation and colonization of the West Bank, and other seized territory, like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and the siege of Gaza.

His accusers particularly smeared him as an anti-Semite because of his description of the way the Israeli state mobilized foreign Jewish communities to present its propaganda. And the charges they made against him, are exactly the same charges they made against Mike. Chilson writes

My accusers were very keen to recast comments I made on Israel’s success in recruiting certain leaders of western Jewish communities and turning them into zealous supporters who ostracise opposing Jewish voices, as “making mendacious allegations about Jews as a collective” and “accusing Jews, supporters of Israel and critics of antisemitism as being more loyal to Israel than to the UK…”. And most ludicrous – accusing me of “ denying Jewish people the language to describe their own oppression. “

Mike was also accused of claiming that Jews and supporters of Israel were more loyal to that country than the UK, and denying Jews the language to describe their own oppression. Which makes you wonder whether the genuine racists in these kangaroo courts are simply robots following a pre-written script, into which they shoehorn the comments of the people they smear in order to make the charges sound even halfway reasonable.

Chilson concludes

With such a charge sheet, it did not come entirely as a surprise that Ms Cousins and her adjutants ran the disciplinary hearing as a kangaroo court from start to finish. I was constantly disrupted and harassed by the chair and the ‘presenter’ Dan Hogan, and my replies to the accusations were largely ignored. When Ms Cousins declared that the charges were ‘proved’ I decided to leave the kangaroo court in disgust. The anticipated expulsion letter arrived four days later. I have been expelled for two years. Presumably I am expected to be cured from my ‘antisemitism’ by then.

Mike also described how his counter-questions were interrupted by Cousins during his kangaroo court, as clearly she was unable to rebut them and feared that if the presenter answered truthfully, her case would collapse.

It is clearly outrageous that someone as well qualified as Mr. Chilson to recognize Israeli propaganda, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, who had served in the Israeli forces, should ever have been smeared as an anti-Semite. And it shows the complete absence of any morality or decency in the Israel lobby. They cannot tolerate any criticism of Israel, and so resort to smears and lies. And I’ve no doubt that Chilson was particularly targeted because he had been an Israeli propagandist, and so could very easily expose what was going on.

And there’s also a very nasty streak of racism in Cousins, the NCC and their kangaroo court. Zionism has always cooperated with anti-Semites and Nazis, and this is true of British Zionists. They have marched with the Islamophobic EDL and the Nazis of Britain First. A couple of Zionist activists also show up at events sporting Kach T-shirts. Kach is a far-right, Israeli terrorist organization. Any gentile organization which behaved like this would rightly be accused in its turn of being Fascist. But the Fascists of the Israel lobby get away with it.

The Israel lobby also singles out Israel-critical Jews for abuse and vilification, reviling them as ‘kapos’, and ‘traitors’, and screaming that they wished their families had died in the Shoah.

They have also shown themselves very keen to silence the commemoration of the holocausts experienced by other ethnic groups, like Blacks. This happened to Jackie Walker. I think Walker was particularly concerned that the decimation of African societies during the Slave Trade, and the horrific conditions inflicted on the slaves, should be memorialized at the Holocaust Remembrance Day. She has an excellent point. Reading accounts of the conditions and laws erected by the White legislatures of the European colonies to keep African slaves in their place, you are struck by the sheer barbarity of their treatment. Apart from manacles and shackles, the punishments inflicted on the enslaved included flogging, mutilation, castration and being dissected alive. Life expectancy on the plantations was three years. They have rightly been described as ‘concentration camps for Blacks’.

But Maggie Cousins and her ilk don’t want this to be commemorated alongside the Holocaust. They deny that there are groups trying to reserve the Holocaust solely for that suffered by the Jews, even when this is being done, as Walker and Mike showed. And their harassment and persecution of Marc Wadsworth also shows they are intolerant of Black anti-racists and their concerns about anti-Black racism within the Labour party. This is also an element in the persecution of Ken Livingstone, as he raised this issue in a chapter on how the party failed Black Brits in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour.

Cousins is a racist, running the Labour party equivalent of Stalin’s show trials, in order to preserve the power of the Israel lobby and prevent any criticism of the racism and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state.

It is she, who should be put on trial, with Dan Hogan and the NEC, for this. Genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism should say to her what they say to all other Fascists:

I hope everyone had a great Hallowe’en yesterday. I can remember going to Hallowe’en parties as a child, and enjoying the spooky games and dressing up as witches, wizards, ghosts and goblins and so on. At the time, it was good, harmless fun, based on children’s fantasy stories. Adults had their own parties, of course, and there was also something in keeping with the season on TV or the radio. One year, the Archive Hour on Radio 4 looked back on the history of horror stories on the wireless, going all the way back to Valentine Dyall and The Man in Black, and Fear on Four. Actually, I think the only really frightening part of a genuinely traditional British Hallowe’en were the stupid section of the trick or treaters, who threw eggs and flour at your front door, and Carry on Screaming on the TV. This is the Carry On team’s spoof of Hammer Horror movies, in which Fenella Fielding appeared as the vampire Valeria. Fielding died a month or so ago. She was a very accomplished actress, but sadly got typecast because of her appearance in the movie. She was also a staunch Labour supporter, in contrast to her brother, who was a Tory MP. The film was a spoof, but it terrified me when I was in junior school. One critic of such movies once reckoned it was more horrific than anything Hammer produced. All good fun in its time, but I completely understand why some Christians and churches prefer to ignore it.

The Tories, however, chose yesterday to announce something equally ghastly. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, has decided that he wants to create a thousand more ambassadorial posts. And he’s looking to fill at least some of these with business leaders.

Mike reported on this latest bad idea, and put up a few Tweets from Andrew Adonis. Adonis was a minister for New Labour, and he was very scathing about the idea. In one of them he said

we have 20 yrs experience of recruiting Trade Ministers from ‘business.’ Each of them have lasted about a year, having bagged the peerage & achieved little if anything. Think Digby Jones.

He also challenged Hunt to name one business leader who has been a successful ambassador, pointing out that they are different skill sets. It is, he said, the difference between being a successful foreign secretary and a student politician.

Mike also reminded everyone how the Tories tried a similar scheme with their free schools project. They decided to release free schools from all that stifling legislation the requires them to hire properly qualified teachers. The schools hired unqualified staff, and standards plummeted.

It’s not hard to see that Michael Gove’s plan accomplished for schools, Hunt’s wheeze will do for British diplomacy. Ultimately, it comes from the peculiar social Darwinism the Tories share with their Republican counterparts over in the US. They consider businessmen the very best people to run everything, including essential state functions and services. Adam Curtis ripped into this idea, which was developed by the Libertarians in the 1990s, in one of his documentaries. This featured a clip of a Libertarian declaring that, in contrast to politicians, business leaders were better suited to running society because they knew what people wanted and were eager to give it to them through the profit motive. It’s a complete falsehood, as you can see from the way public services and the NHS have deteriorated thanks to Tory and New Labour privatization. Its part of the corporate takeover of the state, which has seen important posts in government go to businessmen and women, a process that has been extensively described by George Monbiot in his book, Captive State.

It also doesn’t take much intelligence to realise that not only are the skill sets involved in business and diplomacy different, but that the appointment of businesspeople in government leads, or can leads, to conflicts of interest. Trump caused controversy when his daughter attended him during talks with the Japanese. This was unethical and inappropriate, as she was the head of a business which could gain a material advantage over its competitors from the information she gained at these talks. Trade negotiations have always been a major part of diplomacy, with ministers and foreign office staff flying off to different parts of the world in the hope of achieving a trade agreement. It really isn’t hard to see how business leaders would be tempted to use their position as ambassadors to enrich themselves and their businesses.

And its also blindingly obvious that this situation will also lead to some deeply unethical foreign policy decisions. Just about the first story in this fortnight’s Private Eye is about how the government’s connections to the arms industry has kept them selling arms to the Saudis despite the butchering of civilians, including women and children in Yemen. Human rights activists and opposition groups have been calling for an end to the war and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. However, Private Eye notes that

The final decision on licensing falls to international trade secretary Liam Fox. His priority is business at any cost, and his department is judged on exports and investment into the UK.

See ‘Flying Fox’ in Private Eye, 2nd-15th November 2018, p.7).

Which shows you the Tories’ priorities in these cases: trade and business first, with Human Rights a very long way behind. But it will stop the government suffering embarrassments from ambassadors, who get concerned at the way the British government is propping up foreign dictators simply for the sake of profitable business deals. Like Craig Murray, who was our man in one of the new, central Asian states that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was appalled at the way Britain was doing just that with the local despot, spoke out, and was sacked and smeared for doing so.

It’s also a move which seems squarely aimed at preventing further social mobility. A few years ago, the government had a policy of recruiting ambassadors and staff from suitably capable people of working class background. I don’t know if the policy is ongoing. Somehow I doubt it, given the nature of this government. In theory, as currently ambassadorial staff are part of the civil service, anyone from any background can apply, provided they have the necessary skills and qualifications. In practice, I’ve no doubt most of them come from upper middle class backgrounds and are privately educated. But the ability of working class people to get these jobs will become much harder if they’re handed over to business leaders. A little while ago the newspapers reported that about half of the heads of all businesses had inherited their position. Also, by definition, working people don’t own businesses, though many aspire to have their own small enterprises, like shops or garages. But these posts are very definitely aimed at the heads of big business, and definitely not at the aspiring Arkwrights of these isles.

Hunt’s decision to start recruiting ambassadors from the heads of business will lead to the further corporate dominance of British government and politics, less social mobility for working people, more corruption and conflicts of interests. And Britain continuing to sell military equipment to despotic regimes that don’t need them and which use them to murder civilians in deeply immoral wars. But it’s a Tory idea, so what else can you expect.